LIFE IN A HAREM

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 October 1933, Page 8

LIFE IN A HAREM

EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN. The opening of a new university in Constantinople is the most sensational reform of Kemal Pasha since he tore the veil from Turkish women a decade ago. The whole of the Western culI ture is welcomed —its science, economics, and sociologoy, its history, and its literature. Women will study at the new university alongside men, for the Ghazi has always been in favour of their higher education, and this will complete their emancipation. Up till now education in the New Turkey was so wretchedly inadequate that I was tempted to wonder if all their boasted reforms were not skindeep—whether, once their Ghazi gone, the Turk would not sink back into his old indolence, says a writer in the “Manchester Guardian.” I often went into the harems as interpreter for a woman doctor, and though I had heard a good deal about the “romance” of the seraglios and the beauty of Turkish women, what I felt was repulsion. It was uncanny to see women, the same flesh and blood as oneself, even the same colour, Kept in that sort of imbecility, like half-wild beasts in cages. Sometimes they were laughing and chattering like cokatoos, sometimes they were shy and furtive, but often heavy and langourous with the unnatural look of sick animals. A great many of them were, in fact, consumptive and diseas ed.

When I commented on the restrictions imposed on Turkish women as compared with the freedom enjoyed by our own, my Turkish messenger and guardian remarked: “That is different; Englishwomen are half-men. You don’t know ours. We can’t trust ours out of our sight, and we can’t trust each other, not where women are concerned.”

“Is that why your houses are like fortresses?” I asked. “No windows on to the street, doors studded with huge nails and barred with iron, high walls one can’t, see over, domed roofs one couldn’t climb on to. When I came first I thought there were no houses in your town, only mosques. Is that all to keep your women safe?” “Of course,” he answered.

Undoubtedly the peasant women of Old Turkey, who did agricultural work side by side with their men, were of a more vigorous type those those I saw, but in Macedonia, where the Turks were once the ruling race, one sees nothing of them. When the land was liberated in 1912 the Turks were not turned out of their estates, but they found it impossible to get them worked. They could not dig themselves; of course that would be dishonouring—moreover they lack the cheap labour that every Balkan peasant has in wife and daughters, and the Christians were no longer their serfs and bondsmen. They sold their estates for a song and crowded into towns like Uskub and Monastir.

It is the will of Allah that the glory has passed from the Osmanli race. They prefer to live where the muezzin still calls to prayer, where women are kept safe behind veils and locked doors, and where there is no pressure on them to learn new things or think now thoughts. Their bearing is dignified and decorous, their manner courteous and grave. They are part of the paralysis that was over the whole Turkish world for close on four centuries of empire. Who can tell how much of this paralysis was due to the harem? Something of the animal outlook of the mother transmitted itself to the son, something of the indolence induced by her life, her contentment with ignorance, her lack of ambition. The emancipation of women will even in the West have effects on the future that are unknown and unguessed at. How much more unpredictable will he its influence on Turkey?